Republican state Rep. Alex Kolodin said he used ChatGPT to write a subsection of House Bill 2394, which tackles AI-related impersonations of people by allowing Arizona residents to legally assert they are not featured in deepfake videos.
“I used it to write the part of the bill that had to do with defining what a deepfake was,” Kolodin told NBC News. “I was really struggling with the technical aspects of how to define what a deepfake was,” he said. “So I thought to myself, ‘Well, why not ask the subject matter expert, ChatGPT?’”
The bill was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on Tuesday. The legislation allows Arizona residents to obtain a court order stating the person identified in the deepfake video is not them.
Kolodin said that the portions ChatGPT created were precise.
“In fact, the portion of the bill that ChatGPT wrote was probably one of the least amended portions,” he said.
Hobbs was not aware of the portion of the legislation being authored by ChatGPT.
“I kind of wanted it to be a surprise once the bill got signed,” Kolodin said, noting that it was part of the plan.
You assume that someone actively checked that. We know for a fact that legislators routinely don’t actually read the bills they approve, and a disturbing amount of the time issues are found after things are signed into law because they didn’t actually read the damned things in the first place.
He also claims he asked ChatGPT because he needed the definition of deepfake. So instead of going to any number of dictionaries where definitions are located… He asked an LLM AI that has been proven to provide false information, to generate an answer. And then kept that fact a secret.
The fact he admits that he purposefully kept the ChatGPT use a secret until after it was signed into law proves that he knew it was at least a shady idea. It doesn’t matter whether it actually made a difference, that shows a disturbing lack of ethics.
We have apparently evidence that he doesn’t know what a dictionary is, or how to find one, even online. And a willingness to use tools he doesn’t understand to generate laws everyone will be bound by. From his actions here we have shown a pretty clear lack of proper ceitical thinking and ethics.